August 10 will go down as a Big Day for both search technology and social networking. The most active player was Facebook which announced their acquisition of FriendFeed.
Friendfeed is an aggregator of social network content that allows users to create feeds that pull updates from all kinds of social networking sources, social media, micro-blogging sites (such as Twitter), video sites (such as Youtube) and blogs (such as this one and millions of others).
Along with Facebook’s already developed real time search capabilities, Friendfeed will give Facebook a much greater reach and potentially give them control of a bigger chunk of the overall search market.
Facebook’s immediate target seems to be Twitter – which has also been developing a real time search engine. But Google will be influenced as well. The impact of sites like Twitter and Facebook is starting to make Google’s search territory look old school and even boring in comparison. As Facebook and Twitter become more viable search sources, Google’s stranglehold on that area will be threatened.
Microsoft/Bing/Yahoo are involved in this too, since Bing now provides search not only for Yahoo, but also for Facebook. For more details see Watch Out Twitter! Facebook Launches Realtime Search.